Entering the Ottawa bubble

Even before I left Guelph, I began helping Jean-Marc Lacoste, the nominated Liberal candidate for my home riding of Laurentides–Labelle, having met him on my last visit before moving in the spring of 2010.

[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 ]

I offered Lacoste a roadmap to win the election, and was invited to meet his campaign manager, retired CP executive Norman Wale, along with the former leader, Stéphane Dion, at Wale’s Ste-Véronique home in the north of the riding. Jean-Marc was supposed to come, but could not make it. Dion and Wale had become friends as neighbours, with Dion’s cottage being nearby.

At supper, in my first private conversation with him, I told Dion of Ignatieff’s off-message speech during the 2008 election. He looked at me, angry that I would bring up such a matter, and told me:. “Michael Ignatieff is your leader now. You will support your leader.”

It was the kind of honour and grace Dion always had that the public never fully understood, reminiscent of Joe Clark’s “None of that!” when his supporters booed Mulroney’s victory at the PC 1983 leadership convention.

I spent that summer in a short-lived highly toxic relationship in Hamilton that was difficult to get out of and deeply scarring. Once I managed to get myself back home in September, I set about resuming my original mission from when I left in June: to find a place to work and live in Ottawa. 

Over the next few days, I looked for a place in the capital. Having lost weight on account of my new-found love of walking to work, I wanted to live within 3 km of Parliament Hill and walk it. I did not have a job lined up and only knew that I would work there, somehow, some day. 

I found an ad on Kijiji for someone needing to get rid of her lease as she had taken a job in Montreal, and the landlord signed a new month-to-month lease directly with me within days, for a small one-bedroom condo in downtown old Hull, for $685 per month.

Having sold the house in Guelph that I had bought eight years earlier at a profit, I gave myself 24 months to find full time work in Ottawa. I visited the Liberal Party national office, then at 81 Metcalfe in downtown Ottawa, in mid-September, and that same week my father’s oldest brother Ross suffered a massive stroke and was sent to Ottawa Civic Hospital. 

For my first couple of weeks, I spent more time visiting my uncle than focusing on my job hunt, but I nevertheless asked the Party office to allow me to volunteer, and was quickly met by someone in the technical side of the office, who recruited me to help with database and website work. 

For the next two months, I worked, unpaid, full time at the national party office. Since the 2008 election, the Liberal Party had abandoned ManagElect and replaced it with Liberalist, based on the American Democratic Party’s NGP-VAN database, for partisan work and an identical system called LiberalCRM with different permissions and a green colour scheme set for parliamentary work. Having used CRM in Frank’s office for the previous year, I was an asset with the Liberalist team, and was soon helping Phil, the database administrator with whom I had worked extensively over the phone two years earlier during the Guelph byelection, work on back-end issues.

Pretty soon, I was dividing my time between the party office and the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, where I frequently worked in “the pod,” the media-monitoring centre with several powerful computers and a wall of televisions to monitor all the networks simultaneously. As anything important would come up —usually several times a day, I would fire off an email to the entire communications team.

Being both competent and unpaid was initially welcome, especially in the surprisingly low-budget environment of Parliament Hill. One party employee dropped by my desk to ask if I could help finish digitising a printed spreadsheet that she had received. I looked at it and said sure, it will take me two hours; I’ll come by when I have two hours available to do it. It had already taken one volunteer over a week to digitise the first half of it. A few days later, I was between tasks and I went upstairs to her office to grab it. I took it, recreated the spreadsheet in the promised two hours, and gave it back to her. But it was also not a secret that I was there looking for work, and nobody wants to be shown up by a volunteer.

By the end of January, it was clear that no job offers would be forthcoming at the Party office and I prepared to reevaluate all my options, wondering if I had made the right decision going to Ottawa in the first place.

I applied for, and quickly received, a Working Holiday Visa to Australia, and began making plans to leave Canada and, essentially, find myself. As I often did when things were not going to plan, I grabbed my camera and went trackside, driving out to Smiths Falls to watch Canadian Pacific trains pass through the yard.

While I was there on the afternoon of February 17th, I received an unexpected phone call which would, again, change the course of my life in a dramatic way, and end my entirely overblown self-doubt. 

It was Issie Berish, who was the director under whom I had volunteered at the Party office. He told me that Ottawa South MP David McGuinty was looking for someone to do some data work in his office, and to get him my CV as quickly as possible.

I rushed back to my Gatineau apartment, over an hour away, and got organised to update my CV and send it, which I did at 9 o’clock the next morning.

A few days later, I was called for an interview, and on February 28th I met McGuinty and his executive assistant Jenny in their Parliamentary office in the Justice Building. The interview was perfunctory; David told me I had excellent references, and I start on a one-month, full-time contract — tomorrow. It wasn’t permanent, but I was excited, my emotions flipping back to full positive.

The next day, I came in and began doing the data work that was expected of me. I was also offered other challenges and quickly showed myself to be adept at constituent correspondence letters, as well, which I had not done for Frank.

On March 26th 2011, near the end of my four week contract, the Harper minority government fell on a motion declaring the government to be in contempt of Parliament.

McGuinty invited me to join his campaign; until then I had still planned to return to help Jean-Marc Lacoste back home, and I quickly became McGuinty’s data director, managing all the printed phone and door canvassing lists, sign installation assignments for the sign teams, and entering all the returning data. I excelled at and loved the work. I also unintentionally displaced his long-running data person, who took it quite personally.

I learned that, while there was not a full time job waiting for me after the campaign, he had a plan to share me with four other MPs, giving me a clear path to permanent full-time work after only a few months in Ottawa, and well ahead of my self-imposed 2-year deadline.

One day during the campaign, several volunteers were standing with David at the major intersection of Bank and Walkley holding up signs as he waved. Through his smile, he wryly observed to those near enough to hear: “10 years in university to do this!”

But it worked. People who saw David waving at them in their cars would tell us when we met them at the door over the subsequent days and weeks that they had met David that day, there, on that corner.

History will note that the 2011 election did not go well for the federal Liberals under Michael Ignatieff. David McGuinty, as the opposition House Leader, was the only Liberal House Officer to survive the election, with the whip and leader having been defeated. Lacoste, too, back in my home riding of Laurentides–Labelle fell to the worst-ever defeat for a Liberal in our riding after 16 months of unpaid, soul-crushing, dedicated full-time work, against the NDP’s Orange Wave and its placeholder candidate who had won despite not putting up a credible campaign.

Nor had any of the other MPs McGuinty had hoped to share me with survived the rout that saw us drop to just 34 seats, fewer than half what Dion’s team had managed to win just over 2 years earlier.

On election night, the core team cheered wryly “at least it is a majority!” After 7 years of minority, a gap in election speculation would be a welcome change, even if we had dropped to third party. When I arrived at the victory party, having quickly entered and analysed the data coming back from our scrutineers in the field to validate our win, the volunteers had made a tunnel into the restaurant and were chanting “David! David!” There was much amusement when I arrived a few minutes before him and marched victoriously through the chants.

A few minutes later, the correct David arrived and he began his speech:

“Have you heard the news? We won!”

I don’t remember anything else he said in that speech, but I do remember how profound that comment was for the volunteers there: it was a validation for each one that, while the national party had entirely shit the bed, our work had carried the day here, in Ottawa South.